Conversations with the Garifuna Buyei Yaya about where do Garifuna Songs Come From?

Conversations with the Garifuna Buyei Yaya about where do Garifuna Songs Come From?

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

The Garifunas are amazing for the sheer quantity of music written in the Garifuna language. A dugu ceremony lasts two nights and three days and most of that time is spent singing and dancing day and night. A Garifuna wake or end of mourning ceremony (fin de novenario, similar to the Southern African custom of “final prayers”) lasts from just after dark until dawn and much of that time is spent sing and dancing to punta and parranda songs.

The all night celebrations known as fedu (Celebration) when Garifuna women’s clubs sing hunguhungu songs generally start at 10 pm and end at 6 am.  All of these songs are memorized, as most do not yet have a written form. It is almost impossible to put the polyrhythmic Garifuna music in scores as there is not a set way to play any songs—it is done extemporeneously by the drummers and the other musicians, sometimes in direct response to the way one of the dancers is dancing. There are at least 30 different genres of traditional Garifuna music, with a genre like punta/banguity being determined by the rhythm, the dance that goes with it, and the situation in which it is danced.

Some Garifuna composers like the now deceased Victor Bermudez of Cusuna, the breakman on the Truxillo Railroad,  are known to have composed over 200 songs in Garifuna. It turns out that where do Garifuna songs come from is an interesting topic. One of the people I discussed it with Yaya, my buyei friend who during her life composed 5 songs. She mostly composed in the Punta and female Parranda genres.  Traditional Punta music is a song sung by women, while for comercial Garifuna Punta Rock music, most of the recorded and thus more famous singers have been Garifuna men. 

The first song Yaya composed was on the occassion of the opening of the highway between Trujillo and the Garifuna communities of Santa Fe, San Antonio and on to Guadelupe, west of Trujillo. Until this road was opened, Garifunas would walk along the beach to these communities, sometimes walking the 15 km to Guadelupe and back in a single day like Garifuna teacher Justa Silveria Gotay who “commuted” every day for years in this way to her job in Guadelupe from her home in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo.

While in the United States we tend to take roads for granted, the fight for getting the road opened between Guadelupe and Trujillo was so important to the Garifunas that it is a central theme in the half Garifuna half Spanish play Louvagabu (The Other Side Far Away), performed by the Garifuna Theatre group “Superacion Guadelupe” (Guadelupe Getting Ahead) in which corruption, and issues related to money being sent home by postman on foot to grandmothers who could not read prove some interesting comic relief.

Yaya saw all the fancy cars that Honduran government officials drove to the inauguration event and she was amazed at all the number of cars, and in the song she composed she wonders if they could all be for her.  Dr. Joseph Palacios, a Garifuna anthropologist at the University of West Indies, Belize, writes in an article in “Black Carib-Garifuna” that if we collected all of the Garifuna songs we could probably document the whole history of the Garifunas.

I would not be surprised. Hurricane Fifi over 30 years ago is still remembered in song. I do not know if the Garifuna song collected by the National Garifuna Folkloric Ballet “La Balsa” (The Raft) refers to the Garifunas travelling by raft between the island of Roatan and the Honduran  mainland which happened in 1797 when they first arrived in Trujillo, or if it is even older and refers to escaping in the night from Barbados on a raft to reach the Island of Saint Vincent and to refuge among the Black Carib Indians of St.Vincent, the ancestors of the modern Garifuna.

The Garifuna Gunchei songs like “Generali”  (The General) Armando Crisanto Melendez, the Garifuna Director of the National Garifuna Folklorica Ballet originally from San Juan, Tela, Honduras,  told me refer to a victory of the Garifunas while on the island of St. Vincent against the French, whom they successfully defended the Island against. This was prior to losing the Second Carib War to the English in 1796 and the death of Chief Satuye, which led to their exile to Honduras in 1797. 

Another song Yaya composed was when she was called “bruja” a witch.  She was called a “bruja” because she is a female shaman called “buyei” in Garifuna, but in the Garifuna culture witches and buyeis serve different functions. So she composed the Garifuna song that even though people call me “bruja” I am walking to my fields to grow yams and “chatas” (Saban bananas, called charter bananas in Bay Islands English) for my grandchildren.   

One of the reasons people report that they do not want to be called as buyeis is that other people will point to them (señalar) and talk about them. Yaya still said after 50 years of being a buyei, “I do not like this work. I never wanted to be a buyei. But the spirits said they would take me if I did not accept, so I accepted.”   This is not unusual among shaman worldwide that they do not seek to become shaman, but rather they are called, and they have to accept. Other Garifuna women buyeis I have talked to also said they accepted after becoming sick, because they were told if they did not accept the spirits would take them and they would die.

Another song Yaya wrote was about when some Ladinos from Olancho a number of hours away by bus and days travel by foot or mule came to visit her and ask for medicine. She was amazed that people had come from so far to ask her for medicine and in the song “Olanchuna” wonders how could people from so far away as Olancho know that she made medicine.

A few years ago she rewrote the song and now it says people came from Olancho asking for medicine, there is a gringa who tells people I know how to make medicine. That is the song she wrote about our work together after the book she helped me with “Los Garifunas de Honduras” and the Honduras This Week newspaper articles “Conversations with a Garifuna Shaman: Doña Clara”  had already been published. She could not read in any language, but she had copies of the articles and the book, knew what they said, and had seen her picture in them. Apparantly these moved her to write a song about working with me.

Yaya also noted the trend of the high level of AIDS being reported in the Garífuna communities.  It was so high that she thought it unbelievable. So she wrote a song about that when you ask what illness someone had,  there were no more headaches, no more fevers, people only say That person has AIDS (SIDA in Spanish).

The last song she composed around age 91 caused a small family problem.  Her son Polo’s (short for Hipolito) daughter had had a new baby boy.  She wrote a song in honor of this greatgrandson, saying that he would be a Garifuna of “hacha and azadón” (axe and hoe).  This is a standard Garifuna expression to describe the old time Garifunas where Garifuna men cut down the forest for the women to have somewhere to grow, and the hoe was used to control weeds.  Archaeological remains from the island of St. Vincent in the Yale Peabody Museum collection confirm that the Caribs and Arawak ancestors of the Garifunas were indeed people of “hacha y azadón” with Stone axes and Seashell or Stone hoes.

The Garifuna men could use the axes to fell large trees to make the dug out canoes to travel between the islands, and between the Islands and the mainland. The travel pattern of men being away for six months planting and hunting recorded in Yaya’s story “La Comadrona” (The Midwife) may reflect that the men of St. Vincent which only had a little bit of land and almost no wild animals, spent significant time of the mainland of South America where they farmed and hunted to make up for the fact that St. Vincent was so small and had limited natural resources.  This story like many Garifuna stories, has a sung chorus that is repeated several times during the story. In West Africa, there are stories with choruses and stories without choruses. Garifuna women know traditional stories, called Uragá, but they never are chosen to tell them at wakes, which is when Garifuna men called “uraguistas” tell traditional stories. Yaya would sometimes enjoy sitting at home with her youngest grandaughter who was about 7 and tell her and Yaya’s daughter telling traditional Garifuna stories.  

Yaya sang the song she composed on the occassion of her new greatgrandson for me with her son Polo present.  Instead of being happy that his mother had composed a song for his new grandson, he was angry. “This grandson will not grow up to be a Garifuna of “hacha y azadón”, he will grow up to be a Garifuna of “saco y corbata” (suit and tie)”, Polo said.  After that she never composed another song and I gave up the Project of trying to tape record Garifuna music, which I had done thinking her children would like to have a recording of the songs their mother wrote. She is still alive, now about 95, but she no longer sings and she is bedridden and dying. The recording would not have meant that much to her grandchildren, none of whom speak Garifuna except the youngest Domini who has learned some Garifuna in bilingual education classes in the Socorro Sorrel School in Barrio Cristales,Trujillo.

I asked Yaya how she learned the songs for the dugu and chugu ceremonies. She said the ancestors tell her what songs they want to be sung.  Sometimes they would give her whole new songs to be sung. Abeimajani  (the songs of older women) and Arumajani (the songs of older men), both sung without drums, are thought to be particularly helpful medicinally. 

Singing these songs are a major part of curing people of Sting Ray (raya) stings. I have heard even of White people, like American Kim Brinkley’s daughter who grew up in Trujillo as her grandmother owned the Villa Brinkely Hotel, being cured of Sting ray stings by singing abeimajani to them on them on the beach, so apparantly they work even if you don’t believe. Both a certain number of Abeimajani and Arumajani songs are sung at a dugu or a chugu. One of the older male drummers in Trujillo, known as Calderón, who appears on the cover of Los Garifunas de Honduras drumming, told me he had written an Arumajani song in Garifuna about a fishing trip he had been on, and sang it for me.

When Garifuna men fished, they often took a son or a grandson with them. One of the few Garifuna men in Trujillo who knew arumajani songs was known by the nickname “Subalterno” (subaltern). While fishing his grandfather would lead the arumajani song, and Subalterno would be expected to sing the chorus part. His grandfather also taught him Uraga or traditional stories as they fished. To the extent that Garifuna young men do not fish, they do not have the time to learn and practice these songs and stories, the same with Young women who no longer go to farm with their mothers or grandmothers.   Older Garifuna men as they worked on crafts on the beach, also used to sing and compose songs, and sing them to their Friends who came looking for a breeze on the beach. They would also discuss community business and family problems. In the US we go to therapists, pay city council people and social workers, and composers to do these tasks. The Garifuna men in the past were not, as Ladinos seemed to perceive, just idling away on the beach while their wives worked. Since Garifuna men traditionally fished from 2 am to 10 am, to be able to bring the fish in time for lunch, they had their afternoons free, and they usually did not fish every day which left them with the time to make the majority of Garifuna crafts.

If songs are taught by the ancestors, usually they are revealed in dreams. Not only buyeis receive songs in dreams. For example, Profesor Santos Angel Batíz had a personal Project to collect Máscaro or Wanaragua songs. He had collected about 100 songs. In his dreams, an ancestor appeared and dictated to him another Wanaragua (Dance of the Warriors) song. He told the ancestor in the dream, “I do not have the money to publish this song.”  Usually Garifuna songs are not published, but rather you get a group of your friends together or go to the dance club and sing the song, and see if they like it well enough to “estrenar”, present for the first time, at a celebration such as at Christmas or New Years. Yaya said some of her songs were popular in Santa Fe. Some of her family lived in San Antonio, and she was also in demand to do Garifuna ceremonies in nearby Santa Fe, San Antonio, and Guadelupe.  

Yaya was not one of the buyeis who would lead the singing at a dugu or chugu. She was always playing the marracas, which are the musical instrument thought to really pull (jalar) the ancestor spirits into the dugu or chugu ceremony. Yaya learned to play the maracas in the correct way for Garifuna ancestor ceremonies, because a deceased family member who had been a buyei appeared to her in dreams and taught her how to play maracas. Younger buyeis also generally do not study medicinal plants with older buyeis because they believe the ancestor spirits will reveal to them the plants they will need.

Most of the younger buyeis in Trujillo currently do not speak enough Garifuna to offer a plate of food at a chugu. The future of the Garifuna religióus ceremonies with its three nights and two days of singing in the Garifuna language looks grim. But I have seen the ancestors possess younger Garifunas who do not speak Garifuna and have them give messages in Garifuna when they both did not know anything about the situation they were giving a message about and they did not speak Garifuna well. The older ancestors who used to work for the Banana companies like Truxillo Railroad and will sometimes possess younger Garifunas who do not speak English and have them give messages in English. The male ancestors will also possess female Garifunas and have them give messages in the male form of Garifuna. So don’t count the ancestors out yet.

In Trujillo, the male buyei Enrique (Esly) García, head of the Club Wabaragoun, usually led the singing of sacred songs at a ceremony like a dugu or chugu.  Elsy had spent two months at the house of another buyei to betaught the songs by the other male buyei the recently deceased Santos, according to Santos’s father Beto Reyes. So dugu songs can both be taught by others or revealed by ancestors.

They can also just be composed by individuals like other Garifuna songs. Profesor Santos Angel Batiz told me of participating in meetings with older Garifunas in Sangrelaya who used to compose dugu songs, treat with medicinal plants, and meet to discuss Garifuna matters like should a new word be allowed in the  Garifuna language before a particularly agressive Catholic priest came to Sangrelaya in the mid-twentieth century and threatened to not permit burials of people and other church related punishments to those who met and did such things. There are a lot of words in dugu songs that even fluent younger speakers of Garifuna do not understand. There is a good possibility some of them will be African loan words. Finding this out, however, will not be easy as most Garifunas do not like to translate neither songs nor uruga.

During her lifetime  Yaya had been part of Garifuna women’s dance clubs. She was also in demand at as a singer of punta at Wakes. The first time I met her, before we became friends, she was singing with a trio of Garifuna women at what I later learned was the wake of her half brother  Francisco Avila, who had been the owner of a restaurant in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo Arca de Allianza which was near my house in Barrio Cristales and the wake was held in the street in front of the restaurant which was part of his house. When I would hear Punta drums at night, I would go out, concerned who of my neighbors had died.

I was also at the time helping David Flores with an investigation of Garifuna dances for his book “La Evolucion Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña”. I went to so many Garifuna ceremonies and dances my first year in Trujillo, when I missed a chugu, a few days later, the drummer who was the head of the Garifuna music group in Trujillo  “Los Menudos”  Francisco “Pancho” David stopped me on the street. “Are you OK?,” he asked. “There was a chugu yesterday and you weren’t there, so we thought you must be sick.”

Family members or friends composing songs when someone has died is common. My friend Angelica (Jeca) Gutierrez, my friend Kike Gutierrez’s mother, was not a person to spend time in Garifuna ceremonies like dugus, chugus, and wakes, even though she spoke Garifuna. Perhaps it was because she was very Catholic, having been the housekeeper of the foreign Catholic priests inTrujillo for 12 years, although I have been to both a chugu for her sister before she died and a bath of the soul at her house for her sister after she died.  But when her son Kike died, who had been her main support, she was moved to compose a Garifuna song where she is telling Kike’s sister Lucia (Lucy) in New York that Kike had died, and she sang the song for me, which was very lovely.   This is the origin of most punta songs. One of the members of a dance club in Trujillo also composed a song when Kike was injured and was left in a wheelchair for the next 20 years.  She and the dance club would come and sing it to him.

According to the interview with Paul Nabor, the 80 year old male parranda Singer, guitarist, and buyei, in the video “Aventura Garifuna” by a Spanish TV station, which was on the Internet, he also wrote his most famous song “Nuguyenei” (My Older Sister) at her request when she was dying, to be sung at her wake and as they carried her coffin to the grave yard. I have been told that song is now like the town anthem of the Belizean Garifuna town of Punta Gorda.   He also said he wrote songs when people did something that made him angry, and then he would sing it at the next wake. Most people notice that Garifunas are generally pretty peaceful, unlike Ladinos who are stereotyped as being violent and getting into machete fights before, and shoot with guns now. Garifunas have songs that make fun of people and whole dances particularly the masked dances  at Christmastime which are ways to make fun of people to relieve tensión, so that you do not feel that you have to go out and kill them. Ridicule them instead.  In West Africa, whole festivals of dances of making fun of people (burlar) are known to have existed.

Separation comes not only from death, but also through immigration. Issues related to immigration of Garifunas to the US permeate almost all genres of Garifuna music. There are punta songs such a younger sister telling her older brother  (Nitu) not to immigrate, and leave her alone. There is a man’s song, I think Arumajani about how there is no work here. I am thinking of going to the US.  They say there is work there. Several of Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez’s songs deal with Immigration. On his Lita Ariran (Black Rooster) CD he sings a song called “La Carta” (The Letter) about receiving a letter where his mother, his brother, his uncle, everyone says they are coming from the States to visit and he has to prepare them something. In the video “La Aventura Garifuna” he tells the story of how he composed the song “Yalifu” (The Pelican) when he was 14 years old and living alone in La Ceiba to go to high school, and he was at the beach. The song says he wishes he could change into a pelican and fly to where his father was. His Garifuna father left their traditional Garifuna village of Plaplaya when he was 3 years old and he did not see him again until he was over 20 years and playing a concert in New York City.

 

This is a chapter from the book Yaya: La Vida de una Curandera Garifuna (Yaya: The Life of a Garifuna Healer) which is co-authored by Wendy Griffin and Tomasa Clara Garcia Chimilio, affectionately known as Yaya. Other parts of this book in progress are in the versión listed on WorldCat.  

 

Description of Wendy Griffin's blogs in English and in Spanish for the Ethnomusicologists

Sent to the List Serve of the Society for Ethnomusicology January 25, 2015

Announcement of New Websites by a Researcher in Honduras Interested in Music, Dances, Musical Instruments, Songs, Dance Costumes, and Ceremonies with Music and Dance and Their History and Problems Affecting Their Future Survival ---January 2015

By Wendy Griffin

People who are interested in African Diasopora music, Latin American Rainforest Indian Music, and Mesoamerican Indian music in syncratic ceremonies may wish to look at the new websites of  Wendy Griffin, an independent researcher in Honduras for most of the last 30 years. These new websites  might be of interest to researchers of dance, music, musical instruments, dance clothes, roles of shaman in music and religious ceremonies where dances and music are used among Honduran Rainforest and Mesoamerican Indians, Afro-Indigenous groups like the Garifuna and the Miskito Indians, and Anglo-Caribbean people who immigrated to Honduras. Almost all Honduran Indian and Afro-Indigenous groups also live in other countries.  The Afro-Honduran groups in particular have participated in multiple diásporas from Africa to the Caribbean, Carribbean to Honduras, from Honduras to other Central American countries, and often ending up in the US, which now has more Garifunas than any single Central American country, and most North Coast Black English speakers also immigrated to the US.

 Some Honduran rainforest Indians  and Afro-Indigenous peoples like the Pech, the Tawahka, the Miskito, the Tolupanes and Jicaques and the Garifunas  were able to live quite isolated from the influences of the outside cultures until very recently and also have kept their languages, so that ceremonies with music and dance are either still carried out like among the Garifuna or are living memories among the older people of the other groups. 

Other Honduran Mesoamerican Indians like the Maya Chorti (the builders of the Ruins at Copan Ruinas, Quirigua and Joya de Ceren), the Lencas, and the Nahuas incorporated dances and music into ceremonies both related to Patron Saint Fairs (Guancascos) or into the rites associated with the solar calendar and agriculture and rain with dates of ceremonies unchanged since observed among the Nahua speaking Pipils of El Salvador and Guatemala during the early colonial period and some of which can be correlated to rites described in the Mayan glyphs at Quirigua or known to have existed for the cenote and cave at Chichen Itza.   Although perhaps not well known in the US, major work on documenting everything related to dance and music and ceremonies has been undertaken in Honduras and among the Garifunas of neighboring Belize and among US Garifunas, too, partly as research to support bilingual intercultural education which was made state policy with the approval of ILO Convention 169 in 1995. The Garifunas have for their own reasons been concerned with documenting and rescuing their music and dance, declared Masterpeice of World Intangible Heritage by UNESCO in 2001, one of only two Afro-Descent groups in the Americas to be included in that UNESCO Intangible Heritage program.

Wendy Griffin is most famous for her books Los Garifunas de Honduras (2005) and Los Pech de Honduras (2009) both of which include information on music, dance, ceremonies with dance and musical instruments, and the role of shamans. In the field of music, dance, ceremonies, and their histories, she is also famous for her work with David Flores (2003) in writing “La Evolución Histórica de la Danza Folklórica Hondureña” (The Historical Evolution of Honduran Folkdances) which includes information on the musical instruments, music, dances, ceremonies, and their history for  70 dances from all the  9 minority Indian and Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups currently recognized by the Honduran government and for 70 from the Ladino majority with 125 photos.  

She is also well known as a writer for Honduran English language newspapers about Honduran Indians and Blacks history, culture including music and dance, and current problems including the environment, or Projects, including Honduras This Week (1992-2006—online 1995 -2013) and HondurasWeekly.com (2013-Present).  Her article reviewing David Flores’s book, its importance and its impact published in HondurasWeekly.com in February 2013 has already been read over 5,000 times as has her first article there on the 2012 released Garifuna in Peril movie which has 19 cuts of Garifuna music, most accompanied by traditional dances.

http://www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com

This blog includes a mix of new articles with lists of reference materials available like Cd’s, books, videos, photos of Honduran Indian and Garifuna dances, musical instruments, and people, maps, newspaper and Internet articles, related especially to Afro-Honduran cultures like the Garifunas, Black English speakers, Miskitos, and Afro-Mestizos and vendors of these audio-visual materials.  This includes of her own work, published, unpublished, in museums, and current, and that of other authors, specifically noting which authors are Afro-Hondurans or Garifunas from Belize themselves. This is part of an ongoing personal project with SALALM.org, an association of Latin American collection librarians to help researchers find the relevant materials related to Afro-Hondurans which many published books report not having been able to find.

For example an ethnomusicology student who came to Honduras to study Garifuna dances with a grant arrived at the beginning of the rainy season and left just before Christmas (during the Christmas season at the end of the rainy season in some Garifuna communities they dance up to 14 different kinds of dance and they do not dance outside in the rain) said Garifuna music and dance are not well known in the US of which his choice of research dates for his grant showed he at least could not find the relevant information, even though it was on the Internet in Honduras This Week articles. A Master’s thesis on ethnomusicology published in 2009 in Tomas Avila’s Black Carib-Garifuna said it was a shame no materials were available on Honduran Garifuna dances and ceremonies and music when Wendy Griffin’s studies were published in 2003 and 2005 and were in US libraries shortly after that, and a whole series of her Honduras This Week articles were available on the topic on the Internet. Studies done by Cubans on Afro-Latin American music and dance also completely left out the Garifunas, so there does seem to be a need to help researchers find the resources available, which number in the hundreds, many still for sale or for free on the Internet.

 Some of the recent new articles and a list of resource materials specifically of interest to those interested in ethnomusicology have been added to this website, including where are live traditional Garifuna music groups found in the US as well as resources for books, CD’s, videos, and photos and who are their vendors or if they are in US libraries and thus available for Interlibrary loan. Wendy Griffin is very interested in the African dances, ceremonies, classes of songs, and musical instruments related to those of the Garifunas, a topic about which she already has some results.  Her studies also include things like the life path of a Garifuna shaman, where do Garifuna songs come from and how are they learned and why is the intergenerational system breaking down, the role of Garifuna women’s dance clubs in Garifuna local leadership and society, rites associated with making and using ceremonial drums, environmental, school policies, and religious issues affecting Garifuna, Miskito, Black Bay Islander, Miskito Indian, and Pech music, dance, the local languages in which the songs are sung, and the ability to make musical instruments, etc.

She also has a Spanish language only blog.

http://www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com

Right now most of the articles on it are about the history and successes of the Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans to resolve two principal demands—bilingual intercultural education of which music, dance, traditional dance clothes, ceremonies where these are used, and musical instruments are a signficant part of, and the issue of indigenous land struggles to control the lands from which they get the resources for thier culture.  Most of the ethnic groups use wild resources for making their musical instruments and the Central American rainforest, dry forests, beach, coral reef and fresh wáter resources are currently under heavy pressure and have many legal issues related to recent founding of national parks, land titling, control of wild resources, etc. This blog also has short biographies of most Afro-Honduran authors and the researchers in Honduras who research Afro-Hondurans.

Her other blog was designed to be only in Spanish , but it also has by accident a number of her English articles related mostly to the Garifunas, a problem related to working until 3 am on putting them up.  Because Garifuna ancestor ceremonies are part of the health beliefs of Garifunas as responses to illnesses caused by unhappy ancestors, the female buyei or Garifuna shaman Wendy Griffin worked with and wrote the biography of was also a midwife and a healer with traditional plants, and there are tens of thousands of Garifunas in the US, and Wendy Griffin was speaking at a World Health Conference in Seattle in 2014 about the issue of traditional peoples in US style health care systems, many of the current articles focus on those themes and resources for teaching medical students and medical anthropology students about the issue.

www.historiahondurasindigena.blogspot.com    

Information about her current and past research projects are on her English blog so that if people do not see what they are looking for, but it seems to related to what she has researched, they can contact her. She has a lot of material that is not yet up on the blog as she is updating it and also a lot of her research such as the biography of the Garifuna female shaman Yaya and the study of all the crafts of Honduras including musical instruments are not yet quite in publishable form. The new material by David Flores on The History of the Folkdance clothes of Honduras, which she helped with, is also currently being diagrammed for publication and reléase this year.

Part V--Common Sources of Garifuna language recorded materials

Guide to Garifuna Language Materials

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

 

Part V--Common Sources of Garifuna language recorded materials

Smithsonian’s Folkways Records (4 CD’s) Includes one Garifuna ceremonial music CD. Also includes a CD of work songs, of which there are several genres among Garifuna men and women. Includes the first albumn recorded in Honduras, Doris Z. Stone’s albumn, now CD, from 1954 of the Black Caribs of Honduras.  

www.garistore.com (This is particularly helpful in that you can see what genres of Latin and Caribbean Music Garífunas sing in besides traditional Garifuna music.)

www.garifunainperil.com

www.belizeanartist.com

Record store in  Bronx, New York City noted on the New York City based Garifuna blog www.beinggarifuna.com  His music study of Garifuna music and musicians is very interesting.

www.Amazon.com  (over 100 CD’s in various genres)

Garifuna themed store in Los Angeles

www.stonetreerecords.com  Belize’s only record company.

Youtube  Look for names of Garifuna musicians or Garifuna musical groups.  The documentary made of Aurelio Martinez’s life and which includes 80 year Garifuna parranda singer Paul Nabor from Belize by Spanish TV Aventura Garifuna was cut up into parts and put on Youtube. Usually you don’t know what Garifuna songs mean, but this video subtitles the songs in Spanish including Nuguñanei (big sister) by Paul Nabor and Aurelio Martinez’s Africa.  Paul Nabor explains how he came to write Nuguñanei at the time of his sister’s death and at her request, and how he wants the whole town to sing it when he dies. It has become the theme song of Punta Gorda, Belize. There are several good versions of Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez singing his song “Africa” on the Internet, but this version in a small hut  by the sea surrounded by Garifunas and with subtitles in Spanish that show that he says, “Some of my people forget their race, but I am going to go to the beaches where my forefathers left their footprint Oh, Africa, I will never forget, Oh Africa,”  brings tears to my eyes.

The song was written for when he applied for the Rolex scholarship to study music with a World Music legend in Senegal, which he got. When the song was sung in New York to Garifunas there, the Garifunas were on their feet. Teofilo Colon of BeingGarifuna.com said “It was electric. You should have been there.”

www.Garifunacoalition.com

NPR reports on famous Garifuna musicians, generally those that record with Stonetree records, like Paul Nabor usually have recordings of two or three songs that you can listen to the on the Internet.

www.Vimeo.com   In 2013 159 Garifuna movies on Vimeo.

Search for Garifuna Bible in google and various websites with audio recordings related to recordings of the Garifuna Bible that you can hear for free will come up.

Costa Norte Records of Honduras produces the music of Guillermo Anderson, Honduras’s Cultural Ambassador. While he is Ladino, usually his back up band is mostly Garifuna percussion. Aurelio Martinez got his professional start as back up musician for Guillermo Anderson, and his first band Lita Ariran (Black Rooster) were mostly the percussion section of Guillermo Anderson’s band. Guillermo Anderson is more popular in Europe than in the US and in Europe his music is classified as “World Music”.

 

 

 

 

Part IV Cultural Books Important for Teaching specialized vocabulary in Garifuna like dances and religion

Guide to Garífuna Language materials

by Wendy Griffin

Part IV. Cultural Texts which are Important for the Specialized Garifuna vocabulary

Irufamali: la doctrina esotérica Garifuna. By Salvador Suazo.  This is a book which various buyeis or Garifuna shaman helped him research on the finer points of Garifuna religion. Last year this was for sale by Libraria Guaymuras, so it should be possible to order through Libros Centroamericanos or Literatura de Vientos Tropicales. It has been for sale at www.garistore.com..

Griffin, Wendy and CEGAH (2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras. Includes Garifuna and Spanish vocabulary for medicinal plants, for animals which they hunted, foods, plants which they grew, dances, ceremonies, and all the crafts with photos of every craft. Most of the dances here can be seen in either Garifuna in Peril (mascaro, punta, abeimajani) , El Espiritu de Mi Mama (dugu, punta) both available at www.garifunainperil.com or in Tierra Negra (a chugu) a Telesur version of Causa Justa which is available on youtube. Both in this book and on Ayó there are photos of Garifunas using the African origin instrument “claves” (two round pieces of wood struck together). This book was donated to all the Garifuna schools in Colon, Honduras in class sets to help support bilingual intercultural education. In most schools it fared no better than the PRONEEAAH materials and was kept in storage rather than used in classes. It was used as a teacher resource book for the Garifuna Culture class which was part of the training program for Garifunas who wanted diplomas as bilingual intercultural education teachers.  The topics studied in this book are the topics required to be taught by ILO Convention 169 in intercultural education classes—rights, history (including recovering their history before the Europeans came to both the Americas and Africa), religion, the traditional language and the national language,  traditional technology like traditional medicine, cooking/food processing, agriculture and its soil and water preservation techniques, fishing and hunting and techniques for preventing extinction of these species, collection activities in forest and by the shore, and crafts.

Flores, David (2003) La Evolución Historica de la Danza folklorica Hondureña. TegucigalpaÑ IHER. This includes Wendy Griffin’s study of Garifuna dances in Trujillo and has different photos of these dances than the ones in Los Garifunas de Honduras. It also includes the ceremonies and music and dance of the Miskitos, the Black Bay Islanders, (these two also by Wendy Griffin) and Ladinos so that these other Afro.Honduran groups use of masks, special costumes, musical instruments, beliefs in ancestor spririts  can be compared to those of the Garifunas.

Avila, Tomas Alberto (2009) Black Carib-Garifuna. This text includes descriptions of all of the dances and most of the music by ethnomusicologists working in Belize.  There are differences between Garifuna music and dances even ceremonial music between the Spanish speaking Garifuna ceremonies recorded by Wendy Griffin in Honduras and the Belizean ceremonies and music described in this book and in Dorothy Franzone’s Ph. D. thesis. This book also includes the steps and processes by which the Belizean Garifunas documented the Garifuna dances and songs and submitted them to UNESCO to be declared a UNESCO World Intangible Heritage. The video which they submitted to UNESCO is Garifuna Heritage, currently out of stock at www.garistore.com.

Johnson, Paul (2007) Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa.  University of California Press. This has a very good description of a dugu ceremony in Honduras and has descriptions of Garifuna ceremonies in New York. There are tremendous differences between these ceremonies in New York and how they are done in Trujillo as described in Wendy Griffin’s book. To see a video of a mock dugu see Ali Allié’s El Espiritu de Mi Mama which is in Spanish with English subtitles, which also shows the consultation with the buyei to know which ceremony to do and dancing punta at a wake.

Lopez Garcia, Victor Virgilio has a number of cultural texts which include crafts, foods, parts of religious ceremonies, etc. He is a retired Garifuna teacher from Tournabe, Tela, Honduras.  His books are found under his name in WorldCat. He currently has two books for sale on www.garistore.com. His study of Garifuna food, and Wendy Griffin’s study of Black Bay Islander and Miskito food, and Wendy and Adalid’s studies of Pech food are reproduced in Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez’s textbook (2012) Antropología Alimenticia for an UPN class by the same name.

Armando Crisanto Melendez (2004) El Garifuna y Su Folklore.  He also has another book called something like El Enojo de las Sonajas which is available from www.libreroonline.com. He is the above mentioned Director of the Balet Nacional Folklórico Garifuna.

These also might be important.

Garifuna: SA12 Human Relations Area Files, New Haven, Conn. Only one of these authors Joseph Palacio is a Garifuna. He is a Garifuna anthropologist from Belize who teaches with UWI,  Belize. He is also the author of Garifuna Nation which was available through Amazon.com.  This file includes a book by Gullick on the Caribs of St.Vincent which is scarce in the US.

Island Carib: ST14 Series eHRAF World Cultures Middle American and the Caribbean.

Celestino Green and Santos Centeno are two other published Honduran Garifuna authors of multiple books each and members of the Red de Historiadores Locales y Regionales de Honduras, but their books that I have seen were not about culture, but rather history.

There are a number of famous ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of the Garifunas, but the ones not mentioned here record almost nothing in the Garifuna language.

The modern Garifunas say the Garifunas of the past were “Garifunas de hacha y azadon” (Garifunas of axe and of hoe).  This is supported by the Yale Peabody Museum’s collection of 161  pre-Columbian artifacts from St. Vincent which include stone axes and stone and seashell hoes. Their pre-Columbian collection also includes fish hooks and sinkers for nets from the pre-Columbian period among the Caribbean Arawak. There is a stone statue of the god of Bitter Yuca, which the caption says is carrying a wooden box on its head, but it is clearly a fañine, the round Garifuna basket with an indentation for the head  still used for carrying food such as during the dugu ceremony as shown in Los Garifunas de Honduras. This archaeological collection can be seen online.

The Field Museum of Chicago also has a collection from the Caribs and Arawaks of the Northern South America coast.  One of the relics is a green stone paddle about one-quarter actual size of a paddle, in the same form of Garifuna paddles today. It was probably used as a sign of authority.  This use is probably remembered in the practice of the Garifuna men to have the first man rest his hand on a canoe paddle while singing arumajani, the songs of older men for the ancestors without drums. They also have the large belaire basket sifters for making cassava bread which are identical to the ones the Garífunas use and make today.

The best collections of modern Garifuna crafts in the US are at the Garifuna Museum in Los Angeles and the Burke Museum, University of Washington. Those at the Burke Museum can be seen on the Internet.

Part III --Books Written in the Garifuna Language by Type of book

Guide to Garifuna language materials

by Wendy Griffin

Part III--Books Written in the Garífuna Language

A. Traditional Stories (Uragas)

Uraga garifunouti, Summer Institute of Linguistics. See www.sil.org/language/cab

 Uraga: la tradición oral del pueblo Garifuna by Salvador Suazo This is a bilingual text which read one way is in Spanish and when turned around and upside down is in Garifuna.  Garifuna traditional stories are told at wakes by men at night when children are not present. Since children are not their intended audience, many traditional Garifuna stories are not suitable for use in bilingual intercultural education in primary grades.

CUNY Brooklyn published two bilingual books (Garifuna/English) of Belizean Garifuna Uraga or folk tales by Belizean Garifuna Jessica Castillo when she was in the US doing graduate work. She is now in Belize again.

Roger Reeck’s SIL project has reportedly printed a book of Garifuna stories Uraga in Garifuna as something easier to read before trying to begin to read the Bible in Garifuna. He also has many Garifuna stories which they have not published.  Being a Baptist missionary and the Honduran Baptist church condemns Garifuna ceremonies as diabolic and is against dancing, causes some tension in what Garifuna materials that project would publish.

The Honduran Garifuna stories Wendy Griffin, who does not speak Garifuna well, has collected are in Spanish only in Los Garifunas de Honduras, and in English and Spanish in Habia Una Vez en una Comunidad Garifuna/Once Upon a Time in a Garifuna Village (a manuscript with drawings by her). She also published many of the stories in Honduras This Week in English, but that newspaper is no longer published nor is it online. The principal paper archive is held by the owner’s children in Tegucigalpa who own Honduras This Week Videos at www.hondurasthisweek.com. There were many articles about the bilingual intercultural education project in this newspaper and also about the cultures of the ethnic minorities of Honduras, particularly the Afro-Honduran cultures like Garifuna, Miskitos, and Black English speakers, because those were the groups near her Trujillo home and those were with the Pech the principal groups she helped with bilingual intercultural education.

EduAcción, a USAID funded project in Colon and the Mosquitia areas of Honduras, has collected Garifuna, Pech, and Ladino stories in Spanish. They then asked Pech and Garifuna teachers to hurry up and translate them into Garifuna. It does not work well trying to go from Spanish to Garifuna for a traditional story which has very specific vocabulary in Garifuna and the Garifunas of the National bilingual intercultural program now called DGEIM  are unhappy with the results and it is uncertain if the book will actually be released to the schools. There are also issues of intellectual property rights as the stories were collected without putting people’s names of them and not being clear that the purpose was to publish them and make them available not only to Garifuna and Pech children, but also Ladino children. Garifunas sometimes say “celo mi cultura” I am jealous of my culture, that a lot of elements they do not like to share, and Wendy Griffin in spite of living among the Garifunas for 16 years in general most Garífunas will not tell the meaning in Spanish of Garifuna songs and stories being sung or told.  In some cultures, stories and songs are owned by particular people. Bilingual intercultural education programs need to take into account Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which in Honduras at least are not well protected under Honduras’s current Intellectual Property Law.

SIL also has the book Shaw, Mary (ed.) According to our Ancestors: Folk texts from Guatemala and Honduras (1971) and in Spanish Segun Nuestros Antepasados (1972).

The collections of Honduran Garifuna stories that exist do not support Nancie Gonzalez’s statement in Sojourners of the Caribbean (1988) that most Garifuna stories told at wakes are Anasi stories. There may also be a class of Uraga or traditional stories traditionally told by Garifuna women, especially when with their children or other women, that are not the same as the Uraga told at wakes by men. In Los Garifunas de Honduras and in La Danta que Bailó Dugu there are Uraga stories collected among Honduran Garifuna women. La Danta que Bailó Dugu which is only in Spanish which has stories told by a 103 year old Garifuna woman from Masca, collected by a Honduran Spanish professor from the UNAH,  and published by the Honduran Ministry of Culture is available from www.libreroonline.com.   This book is historic as it was the first book of Honduran oral literature published by the Honduran Ministry of Culture as traditionally the Honduran Ministry of Culture did not feel that oral literature, much less of Honduran Blacks, met the criteria of “culture”. The names of many of the Garifuna spirits or similar dangers in nature like the Agayuma are recorded here and defined.

B. Poetry written in Garifuna

Xiomara Cacho, the first Garifuna woman to have a book published in Honduras, her trilingual Garifuna-English-Spanish poetry book  was titled “ La Voz del Corazon” (The Voice of the Heart), a collection of 8 poems, in 1998 with Editorial Guaymuras. Later she also published Dios Negro (Black God) and “Wafein and His Rattle” (Wafein y su Maraca). She recently presented her Master’s thesis on Bilingual Intercultural Education in Honduras and won a Honduran Literary Prize for her poetry books.  She is a native of the Garifuna community at Punta Gorda, Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras and grew up speaking more English and Spanish than Garifuna, but improved her Garifuna while attending the Trujillo Normal School (grades 10 -12). She is currently studying her doctorate degree in the US with a scholarship. She is also mentioned in Honduran literary historian Helen Umaña’s book “La Palabra Iluminada” (The Illuminated Word) on Honduran poetry (2006). She is included in an article on Garifuna women poets that was published by Latinoamerica: Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos (Latin America: A Journal of Latin American studies). The article is available online. She was previously the Garifuna representative to the national bilingual intercultural education program PRONEEAH.

C. Modern Children’s stories Written in Garifuna

The Honduran national bilingual intercultural education program PRONEEAH produced the book Yalifu (Pelican) with a collection of Garifuna stories suitable for young children. Although it says on the cover that it is a collection of the Oral Tradition, in fact these are modern stories written by two Garifuna teachers-- Prof. Casimiro Laredo of the Socorro Sorrel School in Trujillo and Prof. Teofilo LaCayo retired from the school in Limon, Honduras. All of the materials produced by PRONEEAH are developed in Tegucigalpa while the people who know the culture like uragistas (men who tell uraga) are in the communities. Also noted above, many uraga are not suitable for young children, just as some Grimm’s fairytales like Bluebeard are not really children’s tales, so these teachers wrote new stories for Garifuna children. Most Honduran teachers do not know how to teach with stories in the classroom as this is not a technique common in Honduran schools nor is it taught in Normal Schools. Although the Honduran Ministry of Education had World Bank funding to put libraries in Garifuna and other ethnic  schools, in fact, most Garifuna schools, except for Punta Gorda, Roatan, do not have libraries.

D. History Books Written in the Garifuna language

Salvador Suazo has published a bilingual (Spanish-Garifuna) history book of the Garifunas. It is listed in WorldCat under his name.

Ruben Reyes has made two audio tapes one in Spanish and one in Garifuna (Luragate Garifuna) on the History of the Garifunas. Available on www.garistore.com

E. Cookbooks Written in the Garifuna language

Salvador Suazo has published a bilingual (Spanish-Garifuna) cookbook of Garifuna foods—Da Nubebe: Un Compendio de Comidas Garifunas.  Read one way it is all in Spanish and read the other way it is all in Garifuna. This is currently out of stock at Garistore.com It was for sale at Libraria Guaymuras last year and thus probably can be obtained by ordering from Libros Centroamericanos or Literatura de Vientos Tropicales, book importers from Central America. Libraría Guaymuras has a website so that you can see what is in stock, but they do not ship.

F. Books or CD liner notes with Songs in the Garifuna Language

Lanigui Garifuna by Salvador Suazo. (Garifuna Heart) This was a small songbook with songs only in Garifuna. It included Yarumein (St.Vincent) the National Anthem of the Garifunas, a song from Moors and Christains (Tiras), a song about a curse coming from new York by way of Haiti to come and kill the person, hunguhungu songs of women, Piajamadi a Christmas time dance seldom done any more. It was accompanied by a cassette. Primarily it was the women’s dance club from Sangrelaya who was singing. It was published on the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of the arrival of the Garifunas to Honduras (1997) and was sold in Libraria Guaymuras. While most of Salvador Suazo’s works are in US university libraries it appears that this one is not.  Yarumein sung by Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez with his traditional music group Lita Ariran can be heard on the Garifuna Coalition website.

Ayó by the Garifuna Collective. Recorded by Stonetree Records, Belize.

There are a lot of CD’s of Garifuna music, but Ayó (GoodBye) is the first one I have seen with liner notes that include the whole text of the song in Garifuna and then the whole text of the song in English. They also have a summary of what the song means and what type of song it is and they have beautiful color photos including of some rare instruments the Garifunas can use, but seldom do like the jawbone of a horse or burro, an African origin instrument. The CD is called Ayó because a number of the songs were written to say Good bye to Andy Palacios the Garifuna singer who died in 2008 and who founded the Garifuna Collective which has toured the US, Belize,  and Canada. Writing songs on the occasion of someone’s death is very common in the Garifuna culture. Even my Garifuna friend who seldom attends ceremonies and generally does not sing, wrote a song in Garifuna when her only son and main financial support died.  Stonetree Records recordings can be obtained on many places on the Internet including their own very informative website and Amazon.com. There are videos of the Garifuna Collective with Andy Palacios on Youtube, but the members who actually tour changes.

Armando Crisanto Melendez, the man who has choreographed and led the Balet Nacional Folklorico Garifuna of Honduras for over 40 years has written a bilingual Spanish Garifuna songbook,but has not been able to get funding to publish it, although he is the author of several other books that have been published. The Balet Nacional Folklorico Garifuna is part of Casa Garinagu, an autonomous part of the Honduran government and located on the second floor of a downtown office building right on Central Park in Tegucigalpa. There are Youtube clips of him speaking at the UCLA library prior to the presentation of his Balet Nacional Folklórico Garifuna.

G. Plays in the Garifuna Language

Loubavagu by Rafael Murrillo Selva and Salvador Suazo.  This play uses both Garifuna and Spanish intermixed. It was presented over 1,000 times nationally and internationally at theater festivals by the Garifuna theater group Superación Guadelupe,from the Garifuna community of Guadelupe,  and is Honduras’s most famous play by Honduras’ most famous playwright. Rafael Murrillo Selva did another Garifuna play Las Danzas de las Almas with a Garifuna theater group from Triunfo de la Cruz, but it never reached the same success. Rafael Murrillo Selva also did a play combining Garifuna and Miskito about AIDS with Normal School students in Tegucigalpa. Honduran students often do plays about diverse aspects of the AIDS epidemic, and also other topics like immigration. This play tells the story of the history of the Garifuna people from their formation of Indians mixing with Blacks, includes some ceremonies like wakes, and includes hysterical parts about government corruption, immigration, illiteracy, and the walking postman (correo peaton) in relation to the building of the road to the community of Guadelupe, Honduras.

H.  Health Related Materials in Garifuna

AIDS/HIV Prevention

Radionovela in Garifuna and in Spanish

USAID paid for a radionovela that was bilingual in Garifuna and in Spanish called Los Ancestros no Muere which was designed to help Garifunas talk about AIDS. Discussion groups were held in the communities after the radionovela played on the radio. This radionovela seemed to have been quite popular, although it seemed to have little effect on teen pregnancies which if they were doing the things to avoid that then they would also be avoiding AIDS.  Pamphlets about AIDS and how to use condoms have also been developed in the Garifuna language and used in bilingual Garifuna Spanish seminars which address questions like how do you talk to your spouse about protecting your health from AIDS if you use Garifuna at home.

The Garifuna in Peril Movie, available at www.garifunainperil.com

This movie which is 55% in Garifuna with either Spanish or English subtitles shows how mothers can talk to daughters, and how daughters can talk to boyfriends about AIDS, AIDS testing, teen pregnancy in the context of a teen romance in Los Angeles in what are in my opinion the tenderest love scenes I have seen with African American actors, teen or older. The father is also present saying things like What? A boyfriend? Why am I the last to know?

The SIL people have also done a booklet on malaria (paludismo) in Garifuna.

I. Christian and Catholic Religious Materials in the  Garifuna Language

Garifuna Bible (Sandu Burutu) 1587 pages. Developed by the team lead by SIL/Wycliff Bible Translator linguist Roger Reeck. Sociedades Biblicas Unidas/The Bible Society in Honduras.  Available from garinet.com for $49.97.  Garifunas in Honduras have given it mixed reviews as far as ease of reading or quality of translation, but it is definitely in use especially on occasions when there is a Garifuna Mass. Selections from the Garifuna Bible can be seen for free on the Internet. I have also seen Garifunas use readings from the Garifuna Bible for the readings of the Via Crucis for Holy Week which in Trujillo is done going through the Garifuna neighborhood of Cristales to the Cross of Pardon at the River.

Garifuna Audio New Testament (audio Mp3 CD)

Garifuna Audio Drama New Testament, available from itunes.

Bungiu Wabai lemesi luma uremu Garifuna by Roy Cayetano et al. (Hymns, Garifuna, Texts, Liturgies, Belize)  There has been a small revolution within the Catholic Church which now permits and encourages masses said in the indigenous languages. The Garifunas have embraced this and do Garifuna Masses for special occasions like Garifuna Day, or in Trujillo every second Sunday of the month is a time for a Mass with the songs in Garifuna and accompanied by Garifuna instruments like drums and marracas,and the Lord’s Prayer is even accompanied by the semi-sacred dance abeimajani and arumajani, the gestured songs done without drums.

 A Belizean Garifuna Father Marin rose to the level of Bishop of Belize and Chiapas in the Catholic Church and has helped increase this positive attitude towards the use of the Garifuna language and instruments in Church. There is a special part of the Catholic Church el Pastoral Garifuna which helps attend to the spiritual needs of Garifunas and includes radio shows on Catholic Radio in Garifuna. The use of Garifuna on the radio in Belize, where they had to write down messages people wanted to give over the radio, was part of what spurred some activists to really study how do we write Garifuna. So the two most oppressive institutions which were killing the Garifuna language—the public schools and the Church have both done an about face in their official policies since 1992, some of which has trickled down to the actual communities. In Trujillo, some teenage Garifuna girls went to older Garifuna women to learn Garifuna so that they would be able to sing the songs of the Garifuna mass. This is in a community where trying to form youth dance groups of traditional Garifuna dances has usually failed due to the low or non-existent level of Garifuna among Garifuna young people. In Trujillo, there is also a low access cable TV channel owned by the Garífunas and it frequently shows Garifuna activities in the community, including anything with Garifuna songs and dances. So Garifuna is being heard in the media, too, in Garifuna communities.

The Jesus Movie is available in the Garifuna language.

J. Miscellenous Garifuna Text for Linguistic Analysis

Lines by a Black Carib, by Douglas Mac Rae Taylor

K. Sociolinguistic Studies and Language Loss among Garifunas

There are also Doctoral Dissertations on Sociolinguistics and Language Shift among the Belizean Garifunas. Dr. Genevieve J. Escure also studies the Sociolinguistics of language contact and use between Creole speakers in Belize and Garifuna speakers in Belize.

Escure, Genevieve (2004) Garifuna in Belize and Honduras in Creoles, Contact and Language (2004)

Escure, Genevieve, “An Endangered language: Garifuna in Central America” (Belize and Honduras) 2001-2002 research project with recordings.

For a general article on the situation of the Garifuna language over the whole area it is spoken see Wendy Griffin’s Spanish blog www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com

L. Methodology Text for Teaching Garifuna in the Garifuna Language

Wani Lé—from SIL

Part II Texts about Garifuna language and linguistics and the Garifuna bilingual intercultural ed programs

Guide to Garífuna Language Materials--Part II

Prepared by Wendy Griffin

 

Part II -- Texts about the Garifuna language

The types of texts written about the Garifuna language include A. Dictionaries, B. Books How to Write Garifuna and the Controversy of the Garifuna Alphabet, C. Books about Garifuna Grammar D. Books on Historical Linguistics Issues Related to the Garifuna language E. Books (Cartillas) to teach Reading and Writing of Garifuna to Garifuna children and the Honduran Bilingual Intercultural Education Program for Garifuna children. F. Materials about the Honduran Bilingual Intercultural Education Project for Garífunas

Part II –Written texts about the Garifuna language

A. Dictionaries

Cayetano, Roy E. (1993) The People’s Garifuna Dictionary-Dimureiagei Garifuna. Roy Cayetano is a Belizean Garifuna who lives in Belize and is active with the National Garifuna Council of Belize. He originally trained as a school teacher. His works can be found in WorldCat searching Garifuna language Belize or under his name. This is an English-Garifuna, Garifuna-English dictionary.  Was $49.97 on www.garinet.com currently out of stock.

Reyes, Ruben (2012) Garüdia: Garifuna Trilingual Dictionary (Garifuna-English-Spanish) This is a large dictionary over 300 pages with just the vocabulary listed in the three languages. Ruben Reyes is also the co-director, co-writer, co-producer, and main star of the Garifuna in Peril movie and his dictionary was presented at the World Premier of the movie during London’s Latin American Film Festival in 2012.  This dictionary represents 20 years of work. According to WorldCat no university in the US holds this dictionary yet. Ruben Reyes is from Triunfo de la Cruz Honduras and thus his dictionary may reflect dialectical differences from Salvador Suazo’s dictionaries, who is from Cusuna, Iriona, Honduras. The dialect of Garifuna from Iriona can be significantly different from that of the area east of Trujillo.   Available for sale on the website of Garifuna in Peril www.garifunainperil.com, in Garistore.com and on Amazon.com.

Flores, Ben (2013) Garüdia: Garifuna Visual Dictionary of Animals and Fruits.  Available on the website of Garifuna in Peril www.garifunainperil.com This is a good companion to be able to compare Jeanette Allsopp’s Spanish French French Creole and English Creole dictionaries of plants, animals, foods, and ceremonies in the Caribbean published by Arawak Press to similar Garifuna vocabulary.

Suazo, Salvador  (2009) Lali Garifuna Garifuna Chamagu (Garifuna-Garifuna and Garifuna Spanish dictionary) A huge dictionary of over 400 pages.  There are Garifuna words, Garifuna description, a sentence in Garifuna using the word without translation, and the Spanish translation of the word.  Salvador Suazo is a Honduran Garifuna from Cusuna, Iriona, and the dictionary was validated in Cusuna. According to early agreements in the Honduran bilingual intercultural education program, the “standard” dialect for written materials is the Trujillo dialect and not the Iriona dialect which gives some problems as the main body of fluent Garifuna speakers live in Iriona, while there are very few children aged speakers of the dialect spoken in Trujillo and to the East. This Salvador Suazo dictionary  is for sale on www.libreroonline.com in the Honduras section.

Salvador Suazo did an earlier (2002) Garifuna-Spanish, Spanish-Garifuna Dictionary Diccionario Escolar Garifuna-Español Español- Garifuna which was distributed to schools in Honduras where the bilingual intercultural education project for Garifunas was active. This dictionary is listed under Salvador Suazo’s name in WorldCat along with his other books.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)/Wycliff Bible Translator team in La Ceiba have also written a trilingual Garifuna-Spanish-English dictionary.  Most of the SIL produced materials in the Garifuna language are listed at http://dc-9629-1146087009.us-east-i-elb.amazon.com/resources/publications/search/language/cab  I did not see the trilingual Garifuna dictionary listed here. The SIL linguist who helped the Garifunas write these materials including heading the 10 year Garifuna Bible translation is Roger (Rogelio) Reeck who lives in La Ceiba, Honduras. His email is on the Internet roger_reeck@sil.org Generally his assistants have spoken the Iriona dialect of Garifuna. The Garifuna Bible now uses the same Garifuna orthography which was adopted by the Honduran and Belizean bilingual intercultural education projects. The previous versions of the New Testament and the Book of John in the Garifuna language used a different SIL developed orthography.

There are older word lists of Garifuna in US libraries that are generally unknown to Hondurans.

Dictionary of the Karib language, Honduras by Alexander Henderson 1872  Carib and Tarascan language studies reel No. B54, No. 2

Dictionary of Karif language as spoken in the Bay of Honduras, Belize, 1872.

Caribe by Alexander Henderson, C. Hermann Berendt, and Daniel Garison Brinton.  Brinton was the first US professionally trained anthropologist.

Vocabularios de lenguas de Honduras y de la parte septentrional de Nicaragua by C. Hermann Berendt, and Daniel G.Brinton (1873-1875) Includes Garifuna (Caribe), Lenca, Jicaque, Matagalpa (Chontal), Ulva, Tawahka, y Miskito.

Eduard Conzemius also wrote Notes on the Karif Honduras in the early 1930’s, and he usually included lists of vocabulary in his works too.  I had read that the Honduran government’s Ministry of Culture recently republished this study in a Spanish version.

B. Books and Websites on How to Write Garifuna and the Controversy of the Garifuna Alphabet

Suazo, Salvador  Conversemos en Garifuna. Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras.  This book is available free in its enterity on the Internet at the website LeaHonduras which is about Honduran authors and encourages Hondurans to read Honduran authors.  The beginning part of this book explains the sounds in Garifuna and how they are written.  The book used the Garifuna alphabet developed in Belize by professors at St. Johns College and used by Roy Cayetano in his dictionary of Garifuna. This book was written prior to Salvador Suazo’s and Roy Cayetano’s work as consultants to the Honduran bilingual intercultural education project, which included meetings to try to develop one single orthography for the 4 Central American countries where Garifunas live.

Suazo, Salvador  La Escritura Garifuna. Currently out of stock in www.garistore.com

Martinez Cayetano, Mateo Normas de Escritura de la Lengua Garifuna—sistematización.  Mateo Martinez a Honduran Garifuna was for a number of years the National Coordinator of PRONEEAH (Programa Nacional de Educación para las Etnias Autoctonas y AfroAntillanas de Honduras) which was in charge of the Bilingual Intercultural Education for all the Ethnic Groups. 

Asociación Misionera Garifuna Walangate This book was developed in Honduras by the Garifunas working with SIL Linguist Roger Reeck to teach how to read and write Garifuna as a prelude to being able to read the Bible in Garifuna. Although developed for adults who spoke Garifuna, in the Socorro Sorrel School in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo it is used to supplement the official Garifuna textbooks to teach children to write developed by PRONEEAH. 

Another book by Asociación Misionera Garifuna is Wani Le (2004) by Kety Martinez, Lucila Martinez, et. al. This is a pedagogical book and is recommended by Dr. Daniel Kaufman. Although I have been told that this Garifuna language project gave seminars on how to read Garifuna and produced materials in fact the materials do not seem to be widely distributed or known in Honduras, and generally the official national Garifuna bilingual intercultural education program in Honduras did not have copies of the SIL produced materials.

SIL linguist Roger Reeck consulted with the national Garifuna bilingual intercultural education program for one year, but it was such a bad experience that he said he did not want to know anything more of the project. He was also instrumental in helping to develop the first literacy cartilla or book in Miskito for bilingual intercultural education in that language. He currently consults for literacy programs in Guinea Bisseau and among the Arawak speakers of Northern South America, but is still based in La Ceiba, Honduras where his wife is from.

Don Justo A Study of Reading and Writing of Garifuna Garifuna-English-Spanish.  $26.97 for sale on www.garinet.com  Don Justo also has a History of how the Writing of Garifuna was developed for sale on www.garistore.com

Griffin, Wendy (2005) “Anexo Uno: Como leer los Nombres en Garifuna de este libro” in Griffin, Wendy and Comite de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras (2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha y Derechos bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT”.  This article summarizes the conflicts in Garifuna orthography between the Garifuna alphabet developed in Belize and how Honduran Spanish speaking Garifunas feel the language should be written.  These conflicts had earlier been published in two Honduras This Week Online articles which linked to Stanford’s Honduras Teacher’s Corner website, but Honduras This Week has gone out of business and is no longer online. .(“Honduras Teacher’s Corner—http://www.stanford.edu/group/arts/honduras/links/).

Griffin, Wendy (2013) Political Aspects of the Development of the Garifuna and Pech Alphabets. Paper presented at the Second Congress of Central American Linguists (ACALING) in Tegucigalpa, August 2013.  On www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com divided into various parts. Unhappiness with the orthography is only one of the reasons why the Garifuna elementary school teachers generally do not use the Garifuna language books developed by the Honduran Ministry of Education through PRONEEAH. The complaints of the Garifuna teachers are similar to the complaints of the Pech teachers in the evaluation of their materials for bilingual intercultural education which will soon be up on the website and which was part of this paper.

There is an article by Roy Cayetano on the Controversy of the Garifuna alphabet (the St. John’s College version and the older SIL developed alphabet) in Tomas Alberto Avila’s excellent book (2009) Black Carib-Garifuna available through Amazon.com Tomas Alberto Avila is a Garifuna living in Providence, Rhode Island, author of several other books related to Garifunas and to Latinos in Rhode Island, and twin brother of Fransisco Avila formerly the Executive Director of Garifuna Coalition in New York City.  The book is a compilation mostly of writings of leading Belizean Garifuna intellectuals, but there are also some St. Vincent writings and a Master’s thesis on Garifuna dances and music in the music. Roy Cayetano has a second article in this book on the meaning of punta songs, including some special Garifuna vocabulary related to being sad after the death of loved ones, found principally in punta songs. Also interesting is a Joseph Palacios, a Garifuna anthropologist who teaches for UWI Belize, article about words that Garifunas used to describe their families and which anthropologists had thought referred to divisions in the Garifuna society, but the Garífunas themselves did not really  know what the words really referred to. It turns out they refer to villages of origin on the Island of Saint Vincent, and these place names still exist in Saint Vincent.

Alfabeto Caribe by Summer Institute of Linguistics

Ruben Reyes’s trilingual dictionary also begins with an introduction to sounds of Garifuna and how he writes them in his dictionary.

Garifuna liburu (Caribe cartilla) SIL Guatemala, 1956.

Douglas MacRae Taylor  Phonemes of the Hopkins (British Honduras) dialect of Island Carib.  Douglas MacRae Taylor is famous for his groundbreaking ethnography of the Black Caribs or Garifunas of Belize called “The Black Carib of British Honduras” (1951) and is the person who identified the Garifuna language as principally Island Arawak, in books listed below in the section of Historical linguistics.  The books of Douglas MacRae Taylor can be found under his name in WorldCat.

 

C. Books about Garifuna Grammar

Suazo, Salvador Conversemos en Garifuna. Available free on the Internet at LeaHonduras.

Suazo, Salvador La Normativa linguistica Garifuna.

Suazo, Salvador, Gramática Escolar Garifuna.  This was the Grammar book sent by the Honduran Ministry of Education to the Elementary Schools where bilingual intercultural education in Garifuna was being taught. Both are listed under Salvador Suazo in WorldCat.

Ruben Reyes’s Trilingual Garifuna Dictionary also includes in the introduction the complete conjugation of a Garifuna verb, “to see”, and includes the names of the tenses in Garifuna.

Howland, Lillian G. (1984) Spirit Communication at the Carib dugu.  Language and Anthropology.

US Linguists Currently Working on Garifuna Grammar

Dr. Daniel Kaufman, Endangered Language Alliance of New York City, has a material on Garifuna Verbs.  He works particularly with James Lowell a Belizean Garifuna. The person who teaches the class in the Garífuna language is ​Milton Guity who teaches Garifuna classes in NYC and it is through Casa Yurumein, a local Garifuna organization

James Lovell runs music workshops for children and teaches them Garifuna through song. ​ELA has supported his work in NYC and Belize, as well as in St Vincent through Trish St. Hill's YUGACURE/Yarumein  program. James and Dr. Daniel Kaufmann  are now working on an annotated collection of arumahani and abaimahani recordings we began collecting this past summer in Belize and NYC, supported by a grant from the ELDP at SOAS. This should be finished by mid-2015.

Dr. Pam Munro, UCLA Linguistics Dept. Los Angeles, she has written a text to teach Garifuna to non-speakers of Garifuna and uses it in her Garifuna class at UCLA,  She works particularly with Garifunas from Seine Bight, Belize, in Los Angeles and in Seine Bight

Pamela Munro, 1997. "The Garifuna Gender System", in The Life of Language: Papers in Honor of William Bright, ed. Jane H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, and Lyle Campbell, pp. 443-61. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pamela Munro, 2007. "Oblique Subjects in Garifuna." Linguistische Berichte 14: 113-41  (special issue: Endangered Languages; Peter Austin and Andrew Simpson, eds.)

 Pamela Munro and Caitlin E. Gallagher, 2014. "Garifuna Negatives." In L. Michael and T. Granadillo, eds., Negation in Arawak Languages, pp. 13-53. Leiden / Boston: Brill.

Pamela Munro and Maurice Lopez, with Anita Lambey-Martinez, Martha Clayton, and Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Adímureha waman Garífuna (Let's Speak Garifuna). UCLA Academic Publishing (currently three revisions). Used in Linguistics 114, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014. [this is the book  mentioned as being used in Garifuna classes at UCLA].

Dr. Genevieve J. Escure, English Department University of Minnesota.  She is comparing grammar differences between the Garifuna language of Belize and that of Punta Gorda, Roatan, Honduras, and working on an active grammar book. 

Costa Rica linguist working on a Garifuna Grammar book Dr. Juan Diego Quesada, University of Costa Rica.

Older Garifuna grammars generally not known in Honduras

Howland, Lillian G. (1988) Comunicación con los espiritus en un dugu Garifuna (Caribe) Serie grammatical, SIL.

Howland, Lillian (1971) Carib, SIL Guatemala

Ilah, Fleming (1966) Carib, SIL Guatemala

Douglas MacRae Taylor Island-Carib morphology III Locators and Particles

Douglas MacRae Taylor (1977) Languages of the West Indies

Chapter on Garifuna by SIL Linguists working in Guatemala in Lenguas de Guatemala, Marvin K. Moyers (ed.)  See also www.caribbeanlanguage.org for a list of SIL publications about Garifuna.

Grammar of the Karif language as spoken in the Bay of Honduras, Belize, 1872, by Alexander Henderson, C. Herman Berrendt, and Daniel Garrison Brinton, 1872.  If you look up Garifuna language Honduras in WorldCat these older books come up

D. Books on Historical Linguistics Issues Related to the Garifuna language

Suazo, Salvador Conversemos en Garifuna.  This has a list of words in Garifuna men’s speech which are from Carib and words in Garifuna’s women speech that are from Arawak.  Garifuna men and women seldom sing together in part because their versions of certain words in Garifuna are different. This book also states that Garifuna is primarily Island Arawak, probably quoting Douglas MacRae Taylor’s work. He also says there are only 6 words known in Garifuna to be from African languages.  This might be for lack of information about African languages, looking only at languages of West Africa, when Bantu languages and religion and food seem to have a lot of influence among the Garifunas, and not looking at examples of “frozen” language found in Garifuna religious songs and traditional stories which contain words  modern Garifunas often can not understand.

Salvador Suazo also did a book with co-authors comparing XVII century Carib language with the Garifuna language. It is listed under his name in WorldCat.

Douglas MacRae Taylor (1977) Languages of the West Indies  This is probably the book that identifies Garifuna as principally a version of Island Arawak.

Douglas MacRae Taylor Diachronic note on the Carib contribution to Island Carib.

Douglas MacRae Taylor Languages and Ghost languages of the West Indies. This are listed under Douglas MacRae Taylor’s name in Worldcat.

A Critical and Cultural Analysis of an African People in the Americas: Africanisms in the Garifuna Culture of Belize. Doctoral thesis by Dorothy Lawrence Franzone for Temple University. Available through PROQUEST.com  She quotes a Yoruba priest who studied the Garífunas that a number of the terms and other elements of the Garifuna religious ceremonies reflect a West African origin, including seem to be of an older origin than the ceremonies done in West Africa today.

Griffin, Wendy and CEGAH (2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha, y Derechos bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT.  This book traces some of the African and Arawak and Carib elements of Garifuna culture, including finding African origins, principally Bantu, for some names of foods and crafts in the Garifuna language. The book includes the song of Yau mi Yau Miguelei of which the whole song which is a chorus in a story may still be in an African language, probably of Bantu language family, as it is not understandable in Garifuna and is in a story about killing a baby gorilla for its skin to make a bag and the mother gorilla is chasing the children singing the song. BBC recently did a story on an Afro-Cuban woman who was able to return to the Sierre Leone community which was where a song sung by her father was from. She was able to sing the song, a male secret society initiation song, and the community sang the response.  So other people are looking for these types of connections and finding them. The man who song it was in Cuba was excited, because he said, “Before I did not know where I was from, but now I know. I am from Sierre Leone. Now I know where my roots are.”

An example of  “frozen” African language use in Garifuna stories from this books is the story of why the crab has a hard shell, a story also told by the Ga people outside of Accra, Ghana. The main character in the story is called Antidua by the Garífunas. A Ghanan priest studying at Dusquense University told me the name is actually Auntie Duwa which is Aunt or Auntie in English and Duwa which means Wood in Ga.  This character has all the firewood in the world, so it makes sense she would be called Auntie Wood.   West African stories often have choruses in them, and so do Garifuna stories. This story like some other Garifuna stories has its chorus in English (You know me, It wasn’t me.) even when told by people who do not speak English and may reflect the use of English in storytelling in Ghana at the time these Africans were taken away and later formed part of the Garífunas in the Caribbean.

Griffin, Wendy (2013a) Possible Bantu Influence in Garifuna Culture. On the website

www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com of Wendy Griffin. Also includes the Yau Mi Yau Miguelei song.

Griffin, Wendy (2013b)  Buscando Panes: Los Orígenes Africanos de las Comidas Afro-Hondureñas. There is a copy in the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of the NMAI, Smithsonian.  Eventually this article will be on the www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com website, but it is not there yet.  This article connects Garifuna, Miskito, Black Bay Islander, and Ladino foods to similar African foods, which are known by a number of different names in different African languages.  While the exact of origin of Garifuna names for African vegetables like nehu for okra or foods like hudutu for mashed plantains, or yams, there are so many African languages which have words for these foods, like 100 languages in Nigeria alone where they eat mashed yams called fufu in Yoruba,  that it is probably just a case that we have not found the right language yet.

 Some examples of African language origin words among Black Bay Islanders for food include Pap (Afrikans for corn meal porridge) and Konkantee (a porridge of dried banana flour in the Bay Islands and a porridge of  flour made from pounding dried cassava roots in Ghana). The banana recipe is probably the older version of the recipe as cassava (yuca) was introduced to Africa after the discovery of the Americas. This banana flour porridge is known by different names in Garifuna in different communities including pluplumaña in Trujillo.

 

E. Books (Cartillas) to teach Reading and Writing of Garifuna to Garifuna children and the Honduran Bilingual Intercultural Education Program for Garifuna children.

The Honduran bilingual intercultural education program has produced at least 3 cartillas or books for learning Garifuna in first grade.

One version, supervised by Mateo Martinez of PRONEEAH, was written, illustrated, and printed, and was never delivered to Garifuna schools.  Flooding of the Honduran Ministry of Education building during Hurricane Mitch in 1998 may have destroyed both the paper copies and the computers with  the digital copies. The Choluteca River which runs directly behind the Ministry of Education building in Tegucigalpa flooded to the level of three story buildings and the Ministry of Education was only two stories tall.

A second version was developed by Garifunas in the Supervisión Departamental de Atlantida and printed with funds from USAID,but originally was only given to Garifuna schools in Atlántida. Later the Garifuna Emergency Committee (CEGAH) reproduced copies with private funds, which were delivered to Garifuna schools in Colon, Honduras, but most schools with the exception of the Socorro Sorrel School in Cristales, Trujillo did not use these books which were issued to them.

A third version was developed by the Garifunas of PRONEEAH working under Dr. Ruth Moya a Ecuadoran educator and Ronny Castillo, a Garifuna from Iriona. Books for Grades 1-6 only in Garifuna were completed and also teacher manuals were completed to accompany them as well as a National Intercultural Education Curriculum Guide grades 1-6 and books on Spanish as a second language, grades 1-3. These books were printed and delivered to Garifuna schools with funds from the World Bank, but most Garifuna teachers in 2013 reported not using them for a number of reasons.

At the same time as the Socorro Sorrel School requested funds to make copies of Walagate, and the Garifuna cartilla produced by the Supervisión Departamental de Atlántida, they also asked for funds to reproduce a Mathematics book in Garifuna which I believe was developed by the Sociedad Misionera Garifuna, the same people who produced Walagate.  They did receive the funds and so at least at that school there is a book to teach beginning mathematics in Garifuna. Counting in Maya Chorti was also one of the first books the Honduran Maya Chorti developed separately from the national bilingual intercultural education program.  Dr. Lazaro Flores, an anthropologist of the UPN in Honduras produced a study on how ethnic groups taught mathematics in their traditional education. This book is in WorldCat under his name. 

Garifuna liburu Caribe cartilla SIL 1956

F. Materials about the Honduran Bilingual Intercultural Education Project for Garífunas

Griffin, Wendy and CEGAH (2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha, y Derechos bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT.  ILO Convention 169 which Honduras ratified in 1995 guarantees certain rights to bilingual intercultural education which are summarized here.  Also what has been done so far is included and ideas are given for ways Garifuna culture could be included in Garifuna bilingual intercultural education, which has up until now mostly not incorporated the intercultural part of education. The complete Spanish text of ILO Convention 169 is available online on the ILO (OIT) website and also it can be bought in book form published in Honduras from Libros Centroamericanos. 

Besides most Spanish speaking countries on the mainland of Latin America adopting ILO convention 169, in the Caribbean only Dominica adopted ILO Convention 169 for the distant relatives of the Garifunas, the Karibs of Dominica. The Belizean and New York Garifunas in particular have been active in trying to reintroduce Garifuna in St. Vincent and Belizean Garifunas joined with the Belizean Mayas, the Karibs of the Caribbean, and the Indians of Guyana to form an organization of Indigenous People of the Caribbean, so that Garifuna led activism has spilled over into Human Rights legislation in favor of the Karibs of Dominica, who have lost their language as have those of St. Vincent, and who, like the Garifunas, are Black Karibs. 

See also Wendy Griffin’s Spanish language website www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com for more information on the bilingual intercultural education programs in Honduras, including methodology, laws that establish bilingual intercultural education, history of the fight for bilingual intercultural education, some of the results of the struggles of the ethnic groups in Honduras for social, linguistic, and land rights, materials developed for other ethnic groups, and setbacks under the current Honduran administration of President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Two thesises have been written about the Garifuna bilingual intercultural education program in Honduras,  Xiomara Cacho’s Master’s thesis in Honduras and the doctoral thesis of Dr. Santiago Ruiz who got a Doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Florida.  He is currently president of UNAH-Tela in Honduras, the first Black university president in Honduras. Both Xiomara Cacho and the wife of Santiago Ruiz, Sandra Green, have  been Garifuna representatives to PRONEEAH.

“Preservation strategies of the Garifuna language in the context of global economy in the village of Corozal in Honduras” by Santiago Jaime Ruiz Alvarez, University of Florida doctoral dissertation. Available from PROQUEST.com

Garifunas in Guatemala received bilingual intercultural education the same time as the Mayas of Guatemala as a result of the Peace Accords which ended the Guatemalan Civil War. Ruben Reyes translated the Guatemalan National Anthem into Garifuna and it can be heard on the Garifuna Coalition of New York’s website, as can the Honduran national anthem in Garifuna which he also translated and is song in Honduran Garifuna schools. No materials developed for the Guatemalan Garifuna bilingual intercultural education project seemed to have appeared in US libraries.

 Dr. Judith Maxwell of Tulane University, advisor to the Guatemalan Garifuna program, developed a material in Spanish on how to teach indigenous languages as second languages while a Fulbright scholar at a  Guatemalan University.  They did not publish it, they have not returned all the files that she gave them to be able to print it, and her hard drive crashed.  She does have a short document on the Enseñanza de Segunda Idiomas for which she used Maya Cachiquel as the example. Wendy Griffin has a copy. Dr. Maxwell has had amazing results with her method in her FLAS funded summer classes on Maya-Cachiquel in Antigua, Guatemala for which she uses Mayas who speak Cachiquel as the teachers and the Maya Cachiquel teachers said they had good results with the method even teaching Guatemalan Ladinos who must learn the languages of their Mayan neighbors under the Peace Accords, but who come to class not interested in learning the language.

The Garifunas in Belize would like bilingual intercultural education, but looking at the website of the National Garifuna Council of Belize do not seem to have been able to get it approved yet.

The Garifunas of Nicaragua have lost their ability to speak Garifuna, but attempts have been made to reintroduce it using Honduran and Belizean Garifunas usually through Uracan University in Bluefields, Nicaragua. The visit of Andy Palacios to the Nicaraguan Garifunas during the Sandista Literacy Campaign in Indian Languages and seeing the language and the crafts and the drumming and the dancing gone, is what inspired him to fight for the survival of these in Belize. Interviews with Andy Palacios, who suddenly died in 2008 after winning the World Music Expo in 2007 in Great Britain, about his personal fight to save the Garifuna language and culture are on the Internet in print and on Youtube. Wendy Griffin was also in Nicaragua during the Literacy Campaign in Miskito and Sumu languages under the Sandinistas and this was part of what piqued her interest in studying education in indigenous languages and including indigenous cultures when she returned to graduate school.